Social media can be seen as "One small step for man; One giant leap for mankind." It plays a big part of generating much of the world's Big Data. Currently, we are on a path to continuously absorbing that Big Data. Since we use social media for our personal lives and entertainment, we might as well introduce it into the business part of our lives. Many business owners and marketers use social media to advertise certain aspects or promotions of their business. So, if we can somehow implement this with the work that is being done with a hospital, it could make a huge impact for the better!

I have recently attempted to dive into the understandings of how social media functions, auditing, and monitoring. Udemy helped me in better understanding the fundamentals of social media's framework and user interaction. I learned that the best way to find out whether or not your customers are interaction with your business is to use a "real-time" search engine. Why real-time you may ask? Well, the reason we use real-time is to determine the most recent social mentions about you business. "Socialmention" is a nifty tool that determines positive and negative feedback based on the keywords that you input. In return you will receive all sorts of statistics on your search ranging from sentiment, top keywords, top users, and sources. Now that we have all this raw data about our search on your business, we can use it to improve our marketing and business. For example, if we looked at how people located our business online and saw that Photobucket, YouTube, and WordPress are tops among the list. What we can do with this data is narrow it down even more and look for the top source and target that source primarily because we know that most of our users found out about our business through that source (YouTube, for example).

What I have learned from the Udemy lecture on "Social media" is is also important to monitor and listen. For a hospital or medical center, it would be better to look at data that concerns new breakthrough or development and addresses the various departments (a page for each). At the same time, we must monitor the posts and feedback by the hospital's faculty to improve upon our social media framework. This all ties into the field of "Social Media Analytics," where the feedback and data provided by the users is collected and sifted through to respond back to and build upon. Udemy emphasizes the fact that it is important to listen to "your influencers and know what you want them to say." Without feedback and the required attention they need, they can become a thorn in your side and bring down the bar of your businesses success. From what I've understood today, I've come to see that social media audits are a good way to keep track of the performance of your social media.

So much can be done with social media- it's exciting thinking about the progress that it can achieve! We can even bring it to mobile users, but I'll save that for another time... From my general knowledge of past and current social media tools like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, I can say that creating an impactful social media presence is no walk in the park. But, I can say that it will be a pleasant and thought provoking experience for me learning more about it. So.. what's next?

Sinai Applab

Sinai AppLab is a one of a kind lab within an academic medical center- dedicated solely to design and development of patient and provider-facing enterprise apps. It is directed by Ashish Atreja, a physician, informaticist, and gastroenterologist working at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.